The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Prints of José Guadalupe Posada
cruits for and of alternatives to the elite. Second, there was a group of people
in the middle, caught between an urban culture that was symbolically
the property of the symbolically stable elite and a rural culture no longer
able to provide either a real or a symbolic life for them. This second sort of
“middle” class includes not just the first but also large numbers of old and
new artisans and sellers of old and new services. Its members found themselves
looking at once up the ladder of enslaved competition for social promotion
and down it, where they saw both the people whom the city and
capitalism were turning into failures and the irretrievable and repulsive
campesino existence.
In my model, the second of these versions of the middle class tries
both to rise and to guard against falling in culture. On the one hand, they
practice the most (s)lavish imitation they can afford, combining this with
an antagonistic censoriousness of those above them as at once a hedge
against and a disguise for envy. On the other hand, they join the elite in attacking
popular culture, in the hope that they can sanitize the pit into which
they fear to fall. The organized and self-organizing working class, as part of
its making, may be observed joining this attack as fervently as any middleclass
group of temperance reformers, campaigners against blood sports, or
promoters of free libraries. In this case the ideological agenda is different, as
imitation, antagonism, and censure are differently combined; but the action
tends nonetheless to develop behaviors to which those town adjectives—urbane,
polite, and civilized, as well as political and civic—apply. These mechanisms
of emulation and discipline provide a powerful pedagogy, instilling
respect for text-oriented, urbane cultural comportments.
But text-oriented urbanity must generate its own other; the litany
of regret, disdain, incomprehension, and castigation that has met those
commodities and comportments that are reductively categorized as modern
“mass” and “popular” culture marks the process at work. In these characterizations,
the ideas of disinheritance, disempowerment, and surrender predominate.
From this point of view, entry into the commodity capitalism of
mass culture has eliminated the possibility of independence, and radically
reduced and trivialized the arena of individuation; only a full acceptance of
the pedagogy as well as of the cultural satisfactions of the world of modern
rationality can reproduce a space for autonomy. The Frankfurt School and
their outriders, but not they alone, see mass culture, and in particular its
modern “popular” sump, as pathological.
I certainly have no wish to see the cultural formation as healthy, and
indeed I do not seek to look at “it” as an entity at all: I attempt to understand
cultural forms and performances as adaptive, and to determine the
costs and benefits of the particular adaptations that I can identify. Any char-